A former prison officer Erica Whittingham was found guilty of aiding her lover’s escape from prison, and she felt the full wrath of the law. Whittingham’s story befit the phrase “love is blind” as she fell in love with a convict, Michael Seddon, whom she was supposed to be surveilling so that he will not escape. It is not unusual for prison officers to get into a relationship with inmates. Some prisoners solicit favors from these officers by either paying them through their relatives outside prison. Some officers were dismissed for benefitting from prisoners’ packages which contain food, blankets, clothes, soaps, among others. These things are brought to the prison by prisoners’ relatives, and officers would get a potion so that the prisoner would get favors from them.
Whittingham (33), a woman from Bramshall, Uttoxeter, fell straight into the jaws of love to the extent of jeopardizing her job. Popular urban slang in Selena Gomez’s song states, “the heart wants what it wants,” and Whittingham proved this to be true by freeing her convicted lover so that the two love birds would be free. Many prison institutions report on such occurrences, and various workshops are carried out for new prison officers to learn how to co-exist with prisoners without creating relationships with them. In other nations, only male officers are deployed to prisons that house male prisoners, and females work at female prisons.
This strategy was done to ensure that there is proper conduct between officers and prisoners. But due to equality movements worldwide, both males and females can work at a prison with male offenders. Strict measures are usually applied at female prisons, which might have male officers working there. Psychologists and psychiatrists highlight how love can be equated to a drug that can push one to extreme heights in strengthening a relationship. This view can be used to explain Whittingham’s action towards Michael Seddon. After being smitten by Seddon, Whittingham believed that he loved her and the two would have a happy ending, but the law had other ideas for the two lovers.
The Derby Crown Court convicted Whittingham for two offenses, with the first one being harboring an escaped prisoner from 30 September 2019 to 18 March 2020. The other was related to misconduct in a public office between 8 January 2017 and 3 October 2019, and this was a period when she was having a relationship with Seddon. The court revealed that these two met at the prison where Whittingham served as a custody officer at HMP Dovegate, a B category prison near Uttoxeter in Staffordshire. Seddon was later transferred to an open prison in Derbyshire, a facility called HMP Sudbury, but they remained in contact. This is where he escaped from the prison on 1 October 2019, and police reports show that he climbed over a fence while being chased by the prison staff and drove off in a car that was waiting for him. It was depicted that Whittingham was the ‘getaway driver who took him to Stoke-on-Trent the following day, and he boarded a train to Liverpool [Source].
Prosecutors highlighted how Whittingham and Seddon kept in touch and even met on various occasions at different locations. Whittingham was paying for Seddon’s accommodation in hotels. However, Seddon started dating another woman in Bournemouth, and he broke off contact with his “rescuer” between 22 January 2020 and 26 March 2020, but his new relationship did not last long as he was arrested on 27 March 2020 and taken to HMP Winchester. While behind bars, he reached out to his former lover through prison calls which were being secretly monitored, and his relationship with Whittingham was unraveled [Source].
Before escaping, Seddon was imprisoned for Public Protection for robbery, but in 2012 these sentences were abolished and only given to convicts regarded as dangerous. The authorities locked him up for assaulting a 78-year-old man in 2011, whom he tied up at his farmhouse in Bloxworth, Dorset. He was handed an additional six-month sentence for admitting his escape from lawful custody.
During the court proceedings, Whittingham’s legal team told the court that their client was diagnosed with depression after her 11-year marriage crumbled down. She became so vulnerable to the extent of accepting love from a convict. Her defense barrister Mark Sharman argued that her client got attracted to this man, and he said, “It is right that history is littered with often foolish and extreme things people have done in the name of love.”
The judge, Recorder Bairaj Bhatia QC, described it as a “difficult and sad case” and agreed that she was going through a tough time, but said, “I accept that you may have been going through difficult times, that your marriage of 11 years standing had dissolved, and you may have been emotionally vulnerable, but you knew what you were doing was wrong.”
He explained to her that “The evidence makes it plain that you were responsible for escorting him away from those premises in due course, in the knowledge that he was an escaped prisoner.”
Mr. Sharman contended how his client tried to resist Seddon’s love moves, but he pressurized her after noticing that she was no longer wearing her wedding ring [Source]. Constant badgering led to Whittingham accepting his advances and fell for him since she was vulnerable and desperately needed attention. Seddon became the immediate option to a struggling woman who was depressed, as concluded by medical officials. Mr. Sharman said, “She is brutally honest in the pre-sentence report when she recalls that she had found someone to love her, someone she could talk to. Whether that was reciprocated or not, that was how she genuinely feels he felt towards her.”
Because she was a trained prison officer who knows her duties and workplace misconduct relating to prisoners, Whittingham deliberately committed a crime in the name of love, and the judge pointed out that she consciously undertook this act; hence she is guilty for being an accomplice in the escape of a convicted prisoner and for establishing a relationship with a prisoner. One can only sympathize with her, and her case sheds more light on the effects of depression and vulnerability, especially after a heartbreak, as such issues are ignored.
